Frank Schätzing - Limit

Two men appeared in the glass corridor. The shorter man walking in front had long hair and was fashionably dressed, with appliqués on his forehead and cheekbones. It was clearly Grand Cherokee Wang. A tall, slim man in a well-tailored suit walked behind him. There was something dandyish about his combed-back, brilliantined hair, thin moustache and tinted glasses. Jericho watched the way he turned his head about as he walked, scanning the whole corridor and resting his eyes for a fraction of a second on the security camera.

‘Smart operator,’ he muttered.

The two of them went to the middle of the corridor and disappeared from the corner of one camera’s view. The other showed the two of them entering the glass box of the control room with its console.

‘They talk for a while.’ Tu switched to fast-forward. ‘Nothing very much happens here.’

Jericho watched Grand Cherokee gesticulating with jerky speed, obviously showing the other man how the control unit worked. Then the two of them seemed to converse.

‘Now watch this,’ Tu said.

The film slowed down again to real time. The two men still stood next to one another. Grand Cherokee took a step towards the taller man, who stretched out an arm.

The next moment, the student collapsed, crashed his face into the edge of the console and fell to the ground. The other man took hold of him and pulled him back to his feet. Grand Cherokee staggered. The stranger held him tight. On a cursory examination, it must have looked as though he were holding up a friend who had had a sudden dizzy spell. A few seconds went by, then Grand Cherokee fell to his knees again. The tall man squatted down next to him and talked to him. Grand Cherokee doubled over and then lurched to his feet. A little while later the tall man left the control room, but then stopped and turned back. For the first time since he had stepped into the corridor, he turned his face to the camera.

‘Stop,’ said Jericho. ‘Can you blow him up?’

‘No problem.’ Tu zoomed the torso and face until they filled the screen. Jericho squinted. The man looked like Ryuichi Sakamoto playing the Japanese occupier in Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor .

‘Does he remind you of anybody?’ Tu asked.

Jericho hesitated. The resemblance to the Japanese actor–composer was striking. At the same time he had a creeping feeling that he was barking up the wrong tree. The film was ancient, and Sakamoto was well above seventy.

‘Not really. Send the picture over to my computer.’

Tu let the clip play on. Grand Cherokee Wang left the control room and then recoiled from the stranger. The two of them were lost to view for a while, then the tall man came back into sight. He went into the control room and started working at the console.

‘I’m wondering why the security guards didn’t react to that,’ Tu pronounced.

‘To what?’ Jericho asked.

‘What do you mean, to what?’ Tu stared at him. ‘To what you can see here!’

‘What does it look like?’

‘Well, the two of them had a spat, didn’t they?’

‘Did they?’ Jericho leaned back. ‘Aside from the fact that Wang fell to the ground twice, nothing happened at all. Maybe he’s doped up or drunk, or not feeling well. Our oily friend helps him back to his feet, that’s all. Also, the guards have a hundred storeys to watch here, you know how it works. They don’t spend their whole time staring at the screens. Anyway, is there any exterior footage?’

‘Yes, but it’s only put through to the Silver Dragon control room.’

‘Meaning that we can’t—’

‘That they can’t,’ said Tu. ‘We certainly can.’

Just at that moment the tall man left the control room, walked along the corridor and vanished into the next part of the building. Tu started another clip. The screen split up into eight smaller pictures, which taken together showed the whole course of the Silver Dragon’s track. One of the cameras showed Grand Cherokee standing at the end of the last carriage and looking behind himself again and again.

Then he stepped out onto the track.

‘Freeze,’ Jericho called. ‘I want to see his face.’

There was no doubt about it, Grand Cherokee’s face was frozen in a mask of panic. Jericho felt a mixture of fascination and horror.

‘Where does he want to go?’

‘He’s put some thought into it,’ Tu said in a low voice, as though talking out loud would make the terrified man on the tracks fall off. Meanwhile, the Silver Dragon left the platform and passed from one camera view to the next. ‘There are connections between the track and the building on the way round. With a little luck, he’ll reach one.’

‘He won’t though,’ said Jericho.

Tu shook his head silently. Horrified, they watched Grand Cherokee die. For a while neither said a word, until Jericho cleared his throat.

‘The time stamps,’ he said. ‘Once you compare them there’s no doubt that it was our friend who started the Silver Dragon. And something else strikes me. We only saw his face twice, and it wasn’t clear either time. He knew how to keep his back to the camera as well.’

‘And what conclusions do you draw from that?’ Tu asked hoarsely.

Jericho looked at him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But you and Chen – you’ll have to get used to the idea that Yoyo has a professional killer after her.’

No, he thought, wrong. Not just Yoyo.

Me too.

Tu Technologies was one of the few companies in Shanghai with its own private fleet of skymobiles. In 2016 the World Financial Center had been retro-fitted with a hangar for skycars above the offices on the seventy-eighth floor. It had room for two dozen vehicles, half belonging to the company that owned the building, most of these being huge VTOL craft for evacuation. Since Islamist terrorists had steered two passenger jets into the twin towers of the New York World Trade Center not even a quarter-century ago, there had been growing interest in skymobiles with every passing year, leading to the development of various models. By now nearly every newly built super-high-rise in China had flight decks. Seven of the vehicles belonged to the Hyatt: four elegant shuttles with steerable jets, two skybikes and a gyrocopter. Tu’s fleet consisted of two of the helicopter-like gyros and the Silver Surfer, a gleaming ultra-slim VTOL. Last year Jericho had had the treat of piloting it for a few hours: a reward for a job instead of him billing them. It was a wickedly expensive piece of technology. Now Tu was sitting in the pilot seat. He wanted to visit Chen Hongbing, and then had to meet some people for business in Dongtan City, a satellite city of Shanghai on Chongming Island in the Yangtze, which held the record as the world’s most environmentally friendly city. Tu Technologies had developed a virtual canal for the city, which was already threaded with dozens of real canals; their glass tunnel would create the illusion of gliding along through a town in the age of the Three Kingdoms, that beloved cradle of so many stories between the Han and the Jin dynasties.

‘We’ve become the world number-one polluters,’ Tu explained apropos of Dongtan. ‘Nobody poisons the planet as chronically as China does, not even the United States of America. On the other hand, you won’t find anyone else as thorough in applying alternative sustainable designs. Whatever we do, we seem to do it to the limit. That’s what we understand by yin and yang these days: pushing the very boundaries.’

The huge hangar was brightly lit. The in-house VTOLs rested one next to the other like stranded whales. As Tu steered his manta-flat vehicle over to the starting strip, the glass doors at the front of the hangar slid aside. He swung the machine’s four jets to horizontal and accelerated. A howling roar filled the hall, then the Silver Surfer shot out over the edge of the building and fell down towards the Huangpu. Two hundred metres above ground, Hu lifted the machine’s nose and steered it over the river in a wide curve.